Your Doctor May Not Be Around Much Longer
”Let me be clear: if you like your doctor, you can keep him”. Who hasn’t heard the President make that promise by now? The problem is, it makes a huge assumption. That promise assumes that your doctor isn’t going to retire as a result of healthcare reform.
The New England Journal of Medicine reports that more …
A Deficit Neutral Health Bill Isn't Enough
Greg Mankiw explains the spending problems with the healthcare bill through a short, imagined dialog between two friends. Here’s the kicker:
Even if you believe that the spending cuts and tax increases in the bill make it deficit-neutral, the legislation will still make solving the problem of the fiscal imbalance harder, because it will …
There's Nothing Progressive or Conservative About President Obama's Healthplan
Insurer’s Gone Wild
”We allow the insurance industry to run wild in this country,” President Obama declared on Monday. ”We can’t have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the American people.”
Yet Obama’s plan to tame health insurers would boost their business, protect them …
Making your flex spending account a little less useful
”Let me be clear. If you like the health plan you have, you can keep it.” President Obama has made this claim multiple times about healthcare reform. But it’s simply not true. Let me offer one small example.
My wife and I enjoy our Flex Spending Account. We put in enough money each year to cover …
Senate Bill Will Increase Healthcare Premiums
At the request of BlueCross BlueShield, Oliver Wyman did a study of the Senate health care bill. Unsurprisingly, this study estimates that the bill will cost consumers quite a bit more than the CBO estimated.
John Goodman summarized the findings this way:
Premiums for individuals and families purchasing coverage on their own will go up …
The 3 ways to ration what you get
Here’s Warren Meyer, talking about the different types of rationing.
So here is what it boils down to: For every product or service purchase, someone makes a price-value trade-off to determine if that product or service should be purchased for a given price in that particular instance.
One option for …
Estimating health care reform costs
Jon R. Gabel writes in the New York Times today, saying that we shouldn’t fear the cost of health care reform because the CBO has a long history of underestimating the savings from reforms.
In the early 1980s, Congress changed the way Medicare paid hospitals so that payments would no longer be based on …
John Stossel on health care markets
I should know by now that whenever I try to explain something John Stossel has already explained it better. First, he delivers a great quote about why competition keeps prices low.
In a free market, a business that is complacent about costs learns that its prices are too high when it sees lower-cost competitors …
What's wrong with "cherry picking"?
Yowza. This is Jerry Pournelle on education and ”cherry picking”.
On education, the usual critique of charter schools is that they are guilty of ”cherry picking” which is to say, they accept only students who want to learn something and are willing to be disciplined. Thus an academically accomplished charter school in DC was …
The problem with health insurance "exchanges"
In today’s New York Times, David Leonhardt talks about the problem of health care choice. Specifically, the fact that most people don’t have any choice. He starts out making a lot of sense.
Health insurers often act like monopolies — like a cable company or the Department of Motor Vehicles — because they resemble …